One night at the Emergency Room

 

Emergency rooms of hospitals in TV serials ratchet up their TRPs with weekly doses of blood and gore: teenage victims of accidents rushed in on wailing ambulances, bullet-riddled thugs in dire need of blood replacement, angst- ridden doctors making terse conversation and geriatrics suffering coronaries by the dozen. This is the stuff of the emergency room — mounting panic, dire threat and minute by minute danger.

 

However at 9pm on Monday night the emergency rooms of one of South Mumbai’s most prominent hospitals — the Jaslok — has a sleepy deserted air.

 

Catchment to some of the city’s most high profile and heart breaking cases of medical tragedy and fatality, including the most recent one, where last week a young man the victim of a road accident died tragically and some say avoidably —tonight the rooms belie the drama that they have been witness to. Except for a few ordinary cases nothing stirs: no emergencies are rushed in, no life-threatening cases develop and no panic ensues.

 

The four sets of folded wheel chairs lying ready at the entrance remain folded, the stretcher beds lie unused, and the hands on the large wall clock seem unmoving. “Mondays are a slow night,” says Dr Sunita Shinde, as she observes the bank of vacant beds. “But you never know.”

 

“I used to be haunted by the scenes of the emergency cases that were brought here.” says the chatty ayah on duty “but after five years in the hospital you get used to it.” But even she concedes that tonight things are unusually peaceful.

 

One thirty am at the Breach Candy Nursing Home and the staff on duty seem bored and restless. The room with its glistening hospital furniture, its posters imparting pithy pearls of wisdom and its sparkling floors seem more pastoral than the theatre for blood and gore, witness to innumerable scenes of emergency which it has been.

 

Sleepy nurses pad softly down the hall like the benign spirits they are. The corridors — bustling with patients during the day — are deserted and forlorn. And in the car park outside, nothing stirs. “We get all kinds of cases here, accidents, medical emergencies every thing.” Says Dr Sachin the doctor on duty “From here, they are admitted upstairs-or discharged.”

 

But an hour later, no one has passed through the doors, all is peaceful and calm.

 

If there are accidents and burns, heart attacks and suicides tonight, they have obviously been taken elsewhere. Here, in the heart of well-heeled Mumbai, on Monday night and early Tuesday morning, mercifully God’s in his heaven — and all’s well with the world.